The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (16 page)

The arm possessed an identifiable elbow, which surprisingly bent in both directions, and another joint further along, which Rowan decided to refer to as a wrist, from which directly sprouted three slender fingers. Each finger ended in a talon.

While she was comparing the hand to the foot, she became aware that someone was standing nearby-for how long, Rowan had no idea. “Look at this,” she said to the person. “The structure isn’t parallel. In other handed animals, the foot will resemble the hand, in general. Raccoons, for instance. And wood gnomes certainly, not to mention humans.”

“ls Steffie about?” the person asked.

“Inside,” she began, then became aware of the tone of the voices coming from within the house. “Arguing with Gwen,” she added. “This foot no more resembles this hand than a bird’s foot resembles its wing. Less, in fact.” The foot was broad and somewhat flat; it did not seem to possess toes so much as a final division of the five longitudinal supports within.

“Three fingers,” Rowan said aloud, “five toes. How odd.”

“Huh?”

Rowan looked up; the person previously present had left, and now there were two little girls standing in the yard: one by the edge of the house, apparently eager to leave, the other nearer, regarding the corpse gape-mouthed. Rowan said, “Please don’t come any closer. There are parts of this animal that might hurt your skin.” Having said this, she recalled a child in the Outskirts who had discovered something Rowan had thought might be a demon’s egg. The child’s palms had itched slightly the following day.

Rowan picked up the bucket to fetch more water. The children fled shrieking at her approach, as if the steerswoman were herself a demon. They vanished around the corner.

The kitchen knife scored the skin of the arm with difficulty; Rowan had to make two passes to cut deep enough. She peeled back the skin and exposed the muscle beneath.

She regarded it silently; after a moment, she plied the knife again, searching for the bones that would give logic to the muscles’ organization.

She did not at first know the bone when she found it. It did not stop her knife immediately, and she assumed that she was cutting into cartilage, until it was impossible to go farther.

She sat back on her heels, thinking. Then she carefully sliced away all the muscle.

If it was bone, it was unlike any bone she had seen before. Its outer surface did resemble cartilage, thickening as one moved inward. Eventually, within, the substance became as hard as bone, although black in color. Rowan rinsed her hands, her knife, and poured the rest of the bucket over one of the creature’s legs.

As in the arm, the organization of the muscles resembled that of no other animal Rowan had seen before. She ceased to attempt to relate the demon to her knowledge of other animals and was immediately rewarded. “Physics,” she said. “Levers, struts, supports. Pulleys. The arrangement works.”

“How can you do that?” Rowan looked up to find a woman of about her own age standing in the open doorway. The woman’s face showed a horror that the steerswoman considered inappropriate to the situation: the demon, after all, was dead.

“I want to see how it works,” Rowan said. She grasped the ankle of one undamaged leg and pulled. The leg extended. “Look at this— it seems to be a natural move.” She tapped the dissected leg with her knife. “It looks like the animal is designed to jump; but none of the muscles seem to be large enough to make that possible. And it never did so while we were watching . . .”

The bang of the door told her that the woman had departed, quickly.

Rowan considered the severed arm again, then moved to the top of the carcass to see how the shoulder joint worked— and to her amazement discovered the creature’s mouth, at the top of its body, nestled among the bases of the arms. “That’s interesting . . .” No one replied; she was alone.

Mouth in the center, arms growing out from around it. Rowan took the sword and slid it down the creature’s throat, hearing a brittle rasping within. She levered the blade, flat up, and peered beneath it into the maw; the cross slashes inflicted during the fight made the mouth gape obscenely wide. Inside: a series of serrated, overlapping plates that ringed the throat down its length.

Rowan removed the blade and stood regarding the animal, thinking.

She set down the sword and rearranged the demon’s two attached arms, extending them over the demon’s top, then bending the elbows. The double joints easily brought the hands to the mouth. “It works, but it’s not very efficient . . .”

Under what altered circumstances would it be efficient?

In eating, the demon must first pick up its food, then lift it toward its mouth. But it would be best for any animal’s mouth to be at the front of the body, so that the animal might move toward its food to eat it.

With an abrupt change of mental perspective, Rowan saw the demon’s mouth as being at the front of its body; its arms efficiently gathering in food; its legs, kicking, thrusting behind, propelling it.

“Water,” the steerswoman said.

“Right here,” Steffie said. He was seated at the bottom of the back steps, a full bucket at his feet, two full pots on the steps behind him. He picked one up. “Where do you want it?”

She gestured him near. “Pour it over my hands.” He did so, and with the remainder and the contents of the bucket, they rinsed the demon from top to bottom.

Rowan took up the knife again. “I don’t suppose there are any gloves about?”

“No gloves. Mira liked mittens.”

Rowan knelt by the carcass. Remembering the woman who had fled into the house, she said, “I hope you’re not squeamish.” She began slicing down the body.

“No.” He had returned to his seat. “I like watching,” he said. “Sort of a shame the thing’s not alive while you’re doing that.”

Rowan paused and looked up. Steffie was sitting more quietly, more subdued than was usual for him. His face was still, his eyes dark.

Rowan said, “How well did you know the people who died?”

“Knew them all,” he said softly, “since I was a tyke.”

Silence.

“Would you like to help me?”

They found two sticks among the rubbish in the yard; Steffie used them to hold the skin open as Rowan sliced down the center of one of the demon’s quarters.

Rowan had expected to find muscle directly beneath the skin; instead, from just below the spray vent to just above another pair of orifices between the hips, there was a fine membrane, turgid from fluid within. “Stand back.” Using the sword, Rowan cautiously punctured the membrane. It emitted a quiet, sick pop.

An oval depression, about six inches long, appeared around the puncture. The rest of the membrane remained taut. Rowan made another puncture, creating another depression. Both leaked a colorless fluid. The steerswoman became methodical, and soon the entire area was honeycombed with depressions. She carefully peeled the membrane from one depression, revealing a little chamber, its back surface striated blue, its edges weirdly yellow-veined.

Rowan rested on her heels, elbows on her knees, hands loose in front of her. She said, “I have no idea what that is.”

Steffie tilted his head. “People don’t have that?”

“No. People don’t have that. Nor do animals.”

“Buy my meat from the butcher. Never seen inside a person. Until today.” The memory brought shock to his face. He paled, rose, turned away, and succumbed to a fit of dry retching. Rowan watched silently.

When it was over he rinsed his hands, wiped his mouth, refilled the bucket and pots from the rain barrel, and brought them over. “What next?”

“We see what’s under this.”

They sluiced the corpse again, the knife, and their hands. Rowan cut in at the bottom edge of the lowest chambers, along the edges toward the demon’s top, and she and Steffie began pulling the entire area away.

It was difficult. Hundreds of tiny fibrous strands, wound into dozens of slim cables, led from the chambers into the demon’s body, passing through cartilaginous openings between adjacent muscle groups. Eventually, Steffie was using both hands to pull the chamber mass away and upward, as Rowan followed with the knife, cutting strands and cables as she went.

It was a long job, and they grew hot. Rowan wiped her forehead on her shoulder, not wishing to bring her gory hands close to her face. Movement at the edge of her vision caught her attention.

A half dozen persons were standing by the corner of the Annex, in the building’s shadow. “May I help you?” she called. They left, one by one, some quickly, some reluctantly. None spoke.

“They’re wondering,” Steffie said, shifting his grip on the oozy flesh. “Heard the story by now, see. Curious.”

“So am I,” Rowan said distractedly. In the heat and sunlight, the corpse was emitting a rank stench, like rotted fish and spoiled eggs, with a heavy coppery tang that hung cloying in the back of Rowan’s throat. “That’s enough— leave the top.” Rowan examined the muscles on the newly revealed surface.

“Ribs.” She pointed. “See how the muscles angle?” There were a lot of them. With the sword, she split the rib cage, and she and Steffie gripped opposite edges and pulled.

Inside, nothing that Rowan could immediately recognize.

She located the cut ends of the chamber cables and followed them inward to where they terminated at a large bluish mass, its surface striated and deeply creviced, shot through with veins. The substance seemed to comprise a central inner cylinder, running nearly the length of the demon’s body. Rowan’s knife entered it with eerie ease, segments of the matter splitting off, fracturing wetly away from the blade. At the very center, she found a backbone of gnarled black cylinders.

Rowan sat back on her heels again; Steffie waited, silent beside her, puzzled and grim.

Even the smallest animals possessed, after some fashion, ears, eyes, a brain; but Rowan could find nothing resembling these in the demon.

She sighed, washed her hands again, and continued her work.

By sheer logic she identified what must be four lungs, four hearts, and the complicated digestive tract, which she laboriously followed to a single eliminative orifice.

Between each hip joint she found four more orifices. She dissected one, discovering its inner surface completely covered by a multitude of short, muscular tendrils. “I cannot even guess what these are for.”

Tracing inward from this, she located a large sac whose contents shifted under her probings. She slit it open. Within: a multitude of gelatinous nodes, each with a tiny, twisted, translucent object at its center.

Rowan’s interest became intense. “These are eggs.”

She maneuvered a few onto the flat of her knife, angled it to the sun, and used a grass reed to probe one egg. Tiny arms uncurled at one end of the embryo, four frail fins spread at the other. A white line defined the future backbone.

“So, that’s a lady demon,” Steffie said.

“Female, yes . . .”

Rowan knew nothing of the life cycle of demons. But she was certain that special conditions were needed for the creature to survive— conditions found in the Outskirts and the lands beyond.

Of all animals that might wander far from their natural environment, a female carrying fertile eggs seemed the least likely.

Something had driven this demon far from its home. If Rowan could not determine what, she must at least learn all she could about the nature of demons.

She rose. “Ready for more?”

“I am.”

“Good. Help me turn this thing . . .”

It was darkness that finally forced them to stop.

When Rowan entered the Annex, the day’s work, and the previous night’s, suddenly caught up with her. She stood in the middle of the kitchen, stupid with exhaustion.

The battle with the monster now seemed distant, and possibly imaginary. The day that had followed seemed wholly abstract, devoted entirely to thought. It seemed odd to Rowan, at that moment, that so intellectual an exercise could have such an effect on her body.

Steffie had lit a lamp and now stood leaning against the kitchen table, apparently unable or unwilling to move. They both remained still for some time.

“We should eat,” Rowan managed to say.

“Right.”

Neither stirred.

Standing in the homely kitchen, surrounded by the accoutrements of human life, Rowan recalled that there had been other humans about during the day; many had come and gone while she and Steffie worked. She could clearly remember the first few; the rest existed in her mind as brief, vague presences.

Rowan also recalled, now quite clearly, that the first person who had arrived that morning had been Arvin, the archer; that the woman who arrived somewhat later, with dark eyes and wild-curled hair, had strongly resembled Steffie; and that the two little girls had resembled both the woman and Arvin.

The steerswoman said, “I hope you were able to reassure your family.”

Steffie’s mouth twitched once. “Sort of,” he said heavily, then stirred himself to speak further. “Gwen and Alyssa joined up to ride me. They do that.” He looked up at the cupboard before him as if it were an unknown object. He opened it, removed two plates, and set them on the table. “Ends up, I’m to stay away from monsters from now on. Like I don’t plan to.”